Perception of rural landscapes in Flanders: Looking beyond aesthetics

More and more, society's expectations of rural landscapes are rising and farmers are increasingly stimulated to incorporate `green services' into their operational management. This assumes matching perceptions of the landscape between farmers, landscape experts and the general public. A method based on a picture enquiry was used to measure landscape perception in the `Pajottenland', a central Belgian, rural area. Additional questions assessed the importance of meanings and functions of the landscape and revealed differences in perception among three target groups (farmers, landscape experts and country-dwellers). The results confirmed that the three groups look at landscapes in a different way, attaching importance to different landscape features and finding different functions appropriate for the considered landscapes. As a consequence, policies concerning landscape servicing by the farming community should incorporate appropriate incentives of communication and generate modes of understanding between different stakeholders.